A list of the books I've read, or listened to, over the last 8 years, tracked yearly from February - February (my birthday is when I start the next "year").
I think books are best enjoyed with as little beforehand context as possible. This prevents you from filtering out material you may otherwise be surprised by. Find a handful of people whose taste and recommendations you trust, and then just read the book. You'll have plenty of time to figure out what it's about as you go.
For that reason I've avoided writing descriptions or further notes, although I have tried to retroactively bold any books that I found particularly enjoyable.
If you'd like more direct recommendations based on various subjects, check out my book recommender.
2023, 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016
Ways of Being - James Bridle
Life with Picasso - Françoise Gilot
Siddhartha - Hermann Hesse
The Death Ship - B. Traven
Hit Makers - Derek Thompson
Your Music and People - Derek Sivers
The Solace of Open Spaces - Gretel Ehrlich
Fallen Leaves - Will Durant
The Ancient City - Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges
Eating Stone - Ellen Meloy
The Last Lion: Alone - William Manchester
Gifts from the Sea - Anne Morrow Lindbergh
Shadow & Claw - Gene Wolfe
Avid Reader - Robert Gottlieb
Every Good Boy Does Fine - Jeremy Denk
Beckoning Desert - Ed Ainsworth
The Goshawk - T. H. White
In Defense of Plants - Matt Candeias
The Sheltering Sky - Paul Bowles
4000 Weeks - Oliver Burkeman
Song from the Forest - Louis Sarno
Love and Math - Edward Frenkel
Tomas Nevinson - Javier Marías
Just Kids - Patti Smith
Translating Myself and Others - Jhumpa Lahiri
Gods Without Men - Hari Kunzru
The Heart of the World - Ian Baker
Falconer - John Cheever
Three Simple Lines - Natalie Goldberg
The Last Lion: Defender of the Realm - Paul Reid and William Manchester
Sounds Wild and Broken - David George Haskell
Consider Phlebas - Iain Banks
The Old Ways - Robert Macfarlane
Norwegian Wood - Haruki Murakami
True Grit - Charles Portis
All Things Shining - Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Dorrance Kelly
12 Notes - Quincy Jones
The Machiavellians - James Burnham
Saving Beauty - Byung-Chul Han
Scientist: E. O. Wilson: A life in Nature - Richard Rhodes
Going on Being - Mark Epstein
The Lion Tracker's Guide to Life - Boyd Varty
The Books of Jacob - Olga Tokarczuk
The Lost World of the Kalahari - Laurens van der Post
Desert Solitare - Edward Abbey
Alone With You In The Ether - Olivie Blake
Uncommon Measure - Natalie Hodges
Over the Edge of the World - Laurence Bergreen
A Soldier of the Great War - Mark Helprin
To Paradise - Hanya Yanagihara
Second Place - Rachel Cusk
Is God a Mathematician - Mario Livio
American Gods - Neil Gaiman
The Glass Castle - Jeannette Walls
Attached - Amir Levine and Rachel S. F. Heller
The Little Drummer Girl - John le Carré
The Three Body Problem - Liu Cixin
The Beginning of Infinity - David Deutsch
Picasso’s War - Hugh Eakin
A Gentleman in Moscow - Amor Towles
One Long River of Song - Brian Doyle
Rabbit Run - John Updike
The Passenger - Cormac McCarthy
The Last Lion: Visions of Glory - William Manchester
Errata - George Steiner
The Anomaly - Hervé Le Tellier
Eastern Approaches - Sir Fitzroy Maclean
Ocean of Sound - David Toop
Mozart in the Jungle - Blair Tindall
Studying with Miss Bishop - Dana Gioia
Small Things Like These - Claire Keegan
The Creative Act: A Way of Being - Rick Rubin
The Dawn of Everything - David Graeber and David Wengrow
Narcissus and Goldmund - Hermann Hesse
The Tailor of Panama - John le Carré
Our Kind of Traitor - John le Carré
All the Pretty Horses - Cormac McCarthy
A Beautiful Question - Frank Wilczek
Jesus and the Disinherited - Howard Thurman
The Queen of the South - Arturo Pérez-Reverte
Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original - Robin Kelley
Coming into the Country - John McPhee
The Optimist - David Coggins
Kokoro - Natsume Sōseki
When Breath Becomes Air - Paul Kalanithi
Voyage to Alpha Centauri - Michael O'Brien
In Praise of Shadows - Jun'ichirō Tanizaki
The Power and the Glory - Graham Greene
Great River - Paul Horgan
Underland - Robert Macfarlane
American War - Omar El Akkad
Pilgrim at Tinkers Creek - Annie Dillard
Transcendence - Gaia Vince
The Children of Men - Pd James
The Long Walk - Stephen King
Words Without Music - Philip Glass
Mountains of the Mind - Robert Macfarlane
The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari - Robin Sharma
The Shadow of the Sun - Ryszard Kapuściński
What I Talk About When I Talk About Running - Haruki Murakami
Blindness - José Saramago
Empire State of Mind - Zack O'Malley Greenburg
The Long Way - Bernard Moitessier
Launch - Jeff Walker
Identity - Robert Fritz
Considering Genius - Stanley Crouch
The Soccer War - Ryszard Kapuściński
Open Water - Caleb Azumah Nelson
Project Hail Mary - Andy Weir
Until the End of Time - Brian Greene
The Crossing - Cormac McCarthy
Catching the Big Fish - David Lynch
NW - Zadie Smith
The Power Broker - Robert Caro
Dopamine Nation - Anna Lembke
Bill Evans: How My Heart Sings - Peter Pettinger
The Lone Star Ranger - Zane Grey
Music: A Subversive History - Ted Gioia
The Lessons of History - Ariel Durant and Will Durant
Odyssey - Homer
Sex at Dawn - Cacilda Jethá and Christopher Ryan
The Brother Gardeners - Andrea Wulf
What I learned losing a million dollars - Brendan Moynihan and Jim Paul
The Unbearable Lightness of Being - Milan Kundera
Kiss Or Kill - Mark Twight
Crazeology - Bud Freeman
The True Believer - Eric Hoffer
The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With The Sea - Yukio Mishima
White Noise - Don DeLillo
The Years with Laura Diaz - Carlos Fuentes
The Decadent Society - Ross Douthat
Being Mortal - Atul Gawande
Training for the Uphill Athlete - Kílian Jornet Burgada, Scott Johnston, and Steve House
The Storm of Steel - Ernst Jünger
A Brief History of Time - Stephen Hawking
Life Lessons - David Kessler and Elisabeth Kübler-Ross
King Lear - William Shakespeare
Of Wolves and Men - Barry Lopez
How the Universe Got Its Spots - Janna Levin
About This Life - Barry Lopez
The People in the Trees - Hanya Yanagihara
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance - Robert M. Pirsig
Too Loud a Solitude - Bohumil Hrabal
Far Tortuga - Peter Matthiessen
Hell Yeah or No - Derek Sivers
To the Lighthouse - Virginia Woolf
Greenlights - Matthew McConaughey
How to Live: Or A Life of Montaigne - Sarah Bakewell
God's Debris - Scott Adams
The Revenant - Michael Punke
Undiluted Hocus-Pocus - Martin Gardner
Postcards - Annie Proulx
The Course of Love - Alain de Botton
On the Shortness of Life - Seneca
The Living Mountain - Nan Shepherd
The History of the World in Six Glasses - Tom Standage
To Shake the Sleeping Self - Jedidiah Jenkins
Siddhartha - Hermann Hesse
The Architecture of Happiness - Alain de Botton
The Psychology of Money - Morgan Housel
The Music of Chance - Paul Auster
Essentialism - Greg McKeown
The Orchid Thief - Susan Orlean
Awareness - Anthony de Mello
The Drawing of the Three - Stephen King
The Wastelands - Stephen King
Antifragile - Nassim Nicholas Taleb
The Queen of the South - Arturo Pérez-Reverte
The One Thing - Gary W. Keller and Jay Papasan
The White Book - Han Kang
Never Split the Difference - Christopher Voss and Tahl Raz
The Shipping News - Annie Proulx
The Bamboo Bed - William Eastlake
The Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
How Brands Grow - Byron Sharp
I Will Teach You to Be Rich - Ramit Sethi
The Heritage of the Desert - Zane Grey
The Why Axis - John A. List and Uri Gneezy
Multiple Streams of Income - Robert G. Allen
The Long Walk - Stephen King
Beauty and Sadness - Yasunari Kawabata
Mezcal - Charles Bowden
Man's Search for Meaning - Viktor Frankl
Crushing it in Apartments and Commercial Real Estate - Brian Murray
Miles: The Autobiography - Miles Davis and Quincy Troupe
A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
The Wonderful Country - Thomas C. Lea III
The Personal MBA - Josh Kaufman
Meditations - Marcus Aurelius
Best Ever Apartment Syndication Book - Joe Fairless and Theo Hicks
Confessions of a Mask - Yukio Mishima
Built to Sell - John Warrillow
Captivate - Vanessa Van Edwards
Words that Work - Frank Luntz
Smartcuts - Shane Snow
How to Listen to Jazz - Ted Gioia
Ask the Dust - John Fante
Rework - David Heinemeier Hansson and Jason Fried
The Dream of My Return - Horacio Castellanos Moya
Thinking in Bets - Annie Duke
The Meat and Spirit Plan - Selah Saterstrom
A Shooting Star - Wallace Stegner
The Tracker - Tom Brown Jr.
Leonardo Da Vinci - Walter Isaacson
The Moviegoer - Walker Percy
Deep Work - Cal Newport
Everybody Lies - Seth Stephens-Davidowitz
Riders of the Purple Sage - Zane Grey
Sapiens - Yuval Noah Harari
Silence - Shūsaku Endō
The Monkey Wrench Gang - Edward Abbey
Radical Candor - Kim Scott
The Pearl - John Steinbeck
Decoded - Phil Barden
Enlightenment Now - Steven Pinker
The Varieties of Scientific Experience - Carl Sagan
The Stand - Stephen King
Mastery - Robert Greene
Yukon Alone - John Balzar
The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald
Life of Pi - Yann Martel
Principles: Life and Work - Ray Dalio
The Jazz of Physics - Stephon Alexander
American Wolf - Nate Blakeslee
Just Six Numbers - Martin Rees
The World is a Narrow Bridge - Aaron Thier
A Short History of Nearly Everything - Bill Bryson
All the Pretty Horses - Cormac McCarthy
Hacking Growth - Sean Ellis, Morgan Brown
The Righteous Mind - Jonathan Haidt
Luzhin Defense - Vladimir Nabokov
Fooled by Randomness - Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Average is Over - Tyler Cowen
The Undoing Project - Michael Lewis
The Gunslinger - Stephen King
Daring Greatly - Brené Brown
The Three-Body Problem - Liu Cixin
Total Freedom: The Essential Krishnamurti - Jiddu Krishnamurti
The Castle - Franz Kafka
Hillbilly Elegy - J. D. Vance
Master and Commander - Patrick O'Brian
Kafka on the Shore - Haruki Murakami
I Know This Much Is True - Wally Lamb
Stealing Fire - Jamie Wheal and Steven Kotler
Ego Is the Enemy - Ryan Holiday
The Naked and the Dead - Norman Mailer
The Constant Gardener - John le Carré
Murder on the Orient Express - Agatha Christie
The Power of Now - Eckhart Tolle
Out of Your Mind - Alan Watts
10% Happier - Dan Harris
Adventures With Ed - Jack Loeffler
The Crossing - Cormac McCarthy
Black Sun - Edward Abbey
Cry, the Beloved Country - Alan Paton
Scale - Geoffrey West
Red: Passion and Patience in the Desert - Terry Tempest Williams
Purple Cow - Seth Godin
Siddhartha - Hermann Hesse
A River Runs Through It - Norman Maclean
Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki - Haruki Murakami
Growth Hacker Marketing - Ryan Holiday
The Tipping Point - Malcolm Gladwell
Other Minds - Peter Godfrey-Smith
War of Art - Steven Pressfield
The Magic of Thinking Big - David J. Schwartz
Unlimited Power - Tony Robbins
The Cabaret of Plants - Richard Mabey
Tinkers - Paul Harding
It's What I Do - Lynsey Addario
The Art of Possibility - Benjamin Zander and Rosamund Stone Zander
Outer Dark - Cormac McCarthy
Child of God - Cormac McCarthy
A Good Day to Die - Jim Harrison
The Perfect Plan - Bryan Reardon
The Private Lives of Trees - Alejandro Zambra
Coming into the Country - John McPhee
At Play in the Fields of the Lord - Peter Matthiessen
Julip - Jim Harrison
The Master of Go - Yasunari Kawabata
The Obstacle Is the Way - Ryan Holiday
Big Sur - Jack Kerouac
Snow Country - Yasunari Kawabata
The Spy Who Came in from the Cold - John le Carré
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich - Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
All the Little Live Things - Wallace Stegner
Heroes of the Frontier - Dave Eggers
The Wayward Bus - John Steinbeck
Alone on the Wall - Alex Honnold and David Roberts
Influence - Robert Cialdini
The Blind Watchmaker - Richard Dawkins
East of the Mountains - David Guterson
The Circle - Dave Eggers
The Heart Goes Last - Margaret Atwood
Mindwise - Nicholas Epley
A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving
Yes!: 50 Scientifically Proven Ways to Be Persuasive - Noah J. Goldstein, Robert Cialdini, and Steve J. Martin
Demian - Hermann Hesse
Jonathan Livingston Seagull - Richard Bach
Gilead - Marilynne Robinson